2019 Christmas has just passed. Countless radio and television stations are touting this New Year’s Eve will be the “End of a decade.” They are wrong of course. This inspires rage in some who know better. In C (and many other) programming language we count from 0-9. In the human world, and especially calendars, we count 1-10. 2020 is the last year of the 2010’s. If you don’t like that, blame the calendar makers who lost the fight in 1 B.C. Even though number systems had developed a zero around the third century B.C., we didn’t have a year zero. MAD Magazine even lampooned this in one of the books I most likely have rotting in the parent’s crawl space. I think it was “MAD History” or something like that. It had great one page zinger cartoons like “Go with a winner! Join the Armada!” featuring a recruiter for the Spanish Armada.
It’s taken a long time, but adult humans have slowly been conditioned to think of zero as the beginning. First there is nothing, then their is something. Because we don’t use fractional years, parents of newborns say things like “she’s eight weeks old” or “he’s six months.” Still, we don’t count with zero until there is an actual counting number near it, be it 100 or 0.07.
Despite all of the frustration it causes children and adults, the world, and most importantly the world of tech, doesn’t work without a zero. As Colonel Carter famously said in “The Seprent’s Venom” of Season 4, Stargate SG-1,
Just trust me. It’s a math thing.
Admittedly, watching a vehicle odometer roll over from 99,999 to 100,000 is much more entertaining than watching it roll over 100,001. That doesn’t change the reality, the new decade doesn’t start until after we have counted ten.
